


The Boy Without Hands

by themegalosaurus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Amputation, Fairy Tale Retellings, Fairy Tale Style, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Violence (in a fairy tale style)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-09 02:25:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3232787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus/pseuds/themegalosaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cornered, Mary makes a deal with the devil. Fourteen years later, he comes for her youngest son. This is a fairy-tale AU based on the Grimm Brothers' story, The Girl Without Hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written for the Sam Winchester Big Bang 2015 and features beautiful art by my partner Pan (winchesterchola). Find the art post on her Tumblr [here](http://winchesterchola.tumblr.com/post/109122692834/more-hey-this-is-the-art-i-made-for). Thanks also to caranfindel for beta-ing this fic, and to the mods for running such a great challenge!

Mary is hanging out laundry when the devil comes to find her. Mary, the devil says, and his voice creaks like a rusty blade. Mary, tell me what you love.

Mary’s arms are full of their clothes, John’s worn work shirts and Dean’s soft, tiny tees. She feels the warm bulk of the fabric in her arms and she looks the devil in his pale yellow eye and she says, my boys. I love my boys. She wonders after she has said it why she spoke, whether she should have kept this truth treasured up safe inside. But perhaps the devil was looking through her all along.

The devil runs his fingernail along the slope of Mary’s neck. The nail is ridged and grey. The point of it draws a ruby bead of blood from her skin.

I could take them, the devil says. I could take it all.

Mary knows it.

What will you give me? the devil says. His eyes flare orange and his smile is daggers and bones.

Mary is afraid because the answer is so big. She would give anything. Everything she has and everything anybody else has, too, would steal from her neighbours and her pastor and her friends, take what they loved and trade it away and not feel bad about the bargain. This time, she does not say the words but they hang there anyway and the devil picks them up.

I won’t ask that of you, the devil says. What I want belongs to you. But it’s something you don’t even know you have. You won’t miss that, Mary, will you now?

Mary is not a fool. She knows that this deal is rotten all through. I’m not that simple, she says, and she shows the devil her back.

That night the devil burns John and Dean in their beds. Mary is frozen behind a wavering wall of glass, hammering her fists raw and screaming til her voice gives out. John goes angry, loud, and full of fear but Dean dies quietly with tears in his great green eyes, drops hissing on the sticky flesh of his hands as they peel away. Mary stands in the ashes of her home and wails.

When she wakes up, the devil is sitting on her chest. He runs his pointed nail between her breasts and down, over her belly. Beside her, John breathes heavy in sleep.

I’ll take your deal, Mary says.

Two weeks later when her blood does not come Mary begins to see how rotten a deal this was. When something begins to flutter inside her she is taken by a sickness that has nothing to do with the life that she is growing. John rubs her back and strokes her hair and catches her tears in his fingers. He is worried that she does not want the child. Mary tries to tell him how wrong he is but her words come out broken, shards of frantic laughter which spill onto the floor and scare Dean where he is playing.

What’s wrong with Mommy? he asks. John’s face is heavy. He tells Dean that he does not know.

When the baby is born Mary is afraid to look at it for fear of the devil’s dead yellow eyes looking back. They put it on her chest and she turns her face toward the wall. The baby squalls. They lie there, the two of them, for a long long time before John silently reaches to take up the wailing child.

Mary sees John cradle the baby and a light steal onto his face. She sees Dean crowing at it and its small hands splaying to reach him.

She wakes every night when it cries and lies there one, two, three until John shifts himself slow from the bed and takes himself to quiet it.

One day John is not in the house and the baby begins to scream. Mary is careful not to listen but soon there are two howling voices at her ear. Dean looks at her all tears. Mom, he says, Mom I don’t know how to help him, and Mary steps towards her son, tug tug, a string she cannot break, and suddenly the child is in her arms. She looks down at him and he looks up at her and his eyes are not yellow but green and brown and blue.

Mary’s heart clutches and unclutches like a fist. She makes a little box right in the centre of her chest and she bundles up the devil and his deal and his fingernails and squashes them all right down into it. She locks it tight.

The box stays locked for fourteen years. In that long time, the baby gets a name and a thatching of curly brown hair. He gets a dimple in each of his cheeks like a thumbprint in dough and a habit of clinging closely to his brother’s side. Mary watches her children, Dean funny and kind and belligerent, Sam solemn and stubborn and sweet. She feels the sharp corners of the secret inside her and she ties her face on tightly so that the boys cannot tell it’s a mask.

It is Sam’s birthday when the devil comes again. He comes to Mary while she sleeps in her bed, breathes into her ear with the scent of Dean’s burning body and smiles at her with his teeth like broken knives.

I’ve come for the child, he says.

Mary shakes her head and tries to tell him, no, but her lungs are empty paper bags and her voice all withered and gone. The devil laughs at her silence and slithers back into the shadows, leaving a dark dust of sulphur behind him.

When Mary’s legs start working they carry her down the stairs and out into the yard where the devil is talking to Sam. You belong to me, boy, he is saying. Give me your hand. Sam looks up through the shifting sky of his irids and tells the devil, no.

The devil reaches out his wizened claw to the flesh of Sam’s white arm. But something keeps him back. What have you done? he asks. Sam looks at Mary and she looks at him. The devil is gnashing and spitting with rage. I can’t touch him, he says. What have you taught him? What have you done?

Mary says, Nothing at all.

He is too clean, says the devil. It hurts me. It hurts me.

For all of Sam’s life, Mary has been careful to love Sam a little bit less than his brother, because of this moment when he must be taken away. But now, she begins to think that she need not have been so wary. Perhaps Sam is too good, too perfect. Perhaps life is too sweet for the devil to get his desire.

The devil’s yellow eyes burn thick as the bonds on Mary’s heart start easing. Oh no, he says. Oh no. We made a deal. If you want to keep him then I will burn up both of the others. I will burn up John and Dean and their fat will crackle like pigs. So tell me, Mary, what would you have me do?

Mary turns her body towards Sam. She tries to lift her head to see him but it is heavy with shame and she wishes hard for a long moment that she might die, right there, and never have the choice to make it. But still she breathes and the devil breathes too. Then:

What must I do, Sam says. What must I do to save them? His voice is high and uncertain, and Mary thinks that he should be weeping, but his face is dry and bright and his jaw is firm.

The devil laughs. You must take those hands clean off. And then I will take you.

Sam looks at Mary. You must help me do it, he says.

Mary’s father was a huntsman and in the cellar of the house there is a great chest filled with the tools of his trade. Mary goes now down into the belly of her home and opens up the chest and takes up her father’s knife. It is a savage weapon and the blade is sharp. She hears her feet climbing the wooden stairs back to the kitchen. The blade swings heavy and low at her side.

As she passes through the kitchen, Mary takes up her apron. Somewhere far outside herself, she thinks, This will be a messy business.

Sam stands in the centre of the yard and the devil dances around him. When the devil sees the shimmer of the knife in Mary’s hand he falls down flat on his back and cackles, convulsing. Mary knots the apron around her waist.

Sam sways a little, small and slim and set on what he must do. As he kneels at Mary’s feet, he does not take his eyes from the blade. He holds out his hands before him, tight together like the wrists are tied. It is Mary’s sick selfishness that has bound them and it is her selfishness that lifts her elbows high and brings the knife down _snick_ through the flesh and the bone of Sam’s arms.

The hands fall soft onto the earth with a dull dead thump. Mary thinks to see them flapping like fish but they have stopped quite still. The blood pulses wet from Sam’s wrists.

Now, despite himself, Sam weeps. His big limpid eyes fill up slowly like a jug of water under the pump and then splash silvery tears over the stumps of his arms. The blood turns silver too then, and Sam’s arms glow pale. The red raw wounds of Mary’s blade shine starlike. They close over, healed. Mary marvels to see it. The devil’s laughter chokes away.

What magic is this, he says. Mary does not know. Sam does not know. But when the devil reaches his claw again towards the flesh of Sam’s broken body, he hisses and draws it smoking away. Too pure, he says. Too bright.

The devil howls and curses and stamps his foot.  A great hole opens in the earth and he falls down into it. The sound of thousand screaming souls cuts short.

Mary’s son stands silent before her as she trembles. He has saved her. He has saved them all.

He looks at her, and then he looks down at his hands, cut off and useless on the floor. He looks up, at the window where Dean is sleeping.

Mary can see him deciding, but it is too late. With the cauterised stumps of his arms, Sam picks up one of his hands. He offers it to his mother. I need you to strap them on my back, he says.

All the time she is binding the hands with the shreds of her apron, Mary thinks that she will feel the fingers move. Sam’s fingers had been long and very delicate and full of skill. He would use them to plait rope, to carve fine woodwork, to coax music from John’s old guitar. Mary remembers the touch of the fingers on her face. She puts her cheek against them where they lie against Sam’s back but the ice from the tips of them runs down her spine and shivers the memories right out of her.

With his hands secured behind him, Sam steps away. What will I say to Dean, Mary says. She wants to catch back the words as soon as they leave her.

Tell Dean – Sam says. And then, gesturing with his missing hands, Don’t tell Dean.

Mary watches him walk off down the road, straight and tall with his misery on his shoulders. Where he will go to, she does not know.

When Dean learns that his brother is gone, his face closes over hard like the shell of a beetle. His mouth sets tight and thin in grim little stitches. He stops laughing and he begins to look at Mary as if her apron is still covered in the blood the machete spat onto it.

When John learns that his soft-voiced child is missing, he melts down into tears and liquor. The garden grows over and he does not pick up his plough.

Mary begins to realise that she will lose them both after all.


	2. Chapter 2

The years pass by and John dies before he ought to, dissolved in the grief of the loss of his son. Mary and Dean live in the house together, two silent, separate lives.

In time, Mary too becomes ill. She lies in her bed and looks at the sky, and thinks about the night that the devil came for Sam. She remembers how Sam looked at her when the devil asked, What have you taught him? and Mary said, Nothing at all.

When Dean comes to bring her water, Mary says to him, Stay. Dean does not turn his head towards her. But he does not leave. Instead, he sits at the end of her bed. He, too, looks out of the window towards the tops of the trees.

Mary says, I will soon be dead. So I must tell you about your brother and how he left.

The ridge of Dean’s shoulders hardens, but he does not turn.

Mary tells Dean about the day the devil came to her, and how she agreed to take his deal and give him what she did not know. She tells Dean how she tried to guard her heart from Sam, and how she shut the secret of her promise up inside. She tells him about the night that the devil came back. She tells him how Sam walked away with his dead hands tied behind him.

When Mary finishes telling Dean these things, for a long while he does not respond. Mary thinks that perhaps he will never speak to her again.

After a long time, Dean turns around. His face is frozen still, ice on a lake in winter. Underneath, Mary can see the black waters stirring.

Thank you for telling me, Dean says.

He stands up and Mary has to stop herself cringing away from him. It would be fair if he were to hit her like a dog. But he does not. Instead, he takes the thick woollen blanket under which she is sleeping and tucks it gently around her shoulders. He goes downstairs.

Mary lies in bed alone. The stars shine bright and steady over the tops of the trees. She wonders about her other son, whom she will never see again.

When Mary dies, four days later, Dean buries her alongside his father, on a hill at the back of the house.

Once he has covered over the grave, he stands in the garden and tries to see the scene that Mary described to him: Sam on his knees with the devil dancing round him and blood pouring red and then silver into the soil. Dean takes up a handful of earth in his fingers but he cannot find anything of his brother between the stones.

Dean goes down under the house and opens the chest where his grandfather’s weapons are kept. He takes out the biggest blade, the one that Mary used to cut off Sam’s hands. The other weapons are shiny and bright and keen. This one is dull and grimy with blood.

Dean takes his favourite shirt and tears it into cloth. He cleans the knife. He works slowly and methodically and he does not stop until every flake of Sam’s blood has disappeared. Then, he goes back into the garden and takes up a heavy stone. He sharpens the knife until the blade of it gleams ferociously. He sheathes the knife in a pouch of leather, and hangs it at his side. He buries the scraps of cloth in the ground beside his parents.

All of the other weapons Dean loads into a trunk. He shuts up the house behind him and rides away. He does not look back.

For two years Dean follows his grandfather’s profession. He becomes a skilful huntsman. He kills many evil creatures and saves many innocent lives. He travels the country far and wide.

Everywhere he goes, he watches for his brother, and asks after a small slender boy with his hands tied dead at his back. Dean knows in his head that Sam must be growing, changing as he himself has changed. But he can only see his brother as the child trailing behind him. In any case, it does not matter because everywhere he asks in vain.

One winter’s day, Dean finds himself in a small town on the edge of a lake. The lake is wide and still, frosted over in parts like glass. Lights are hung in the houses all around, but the room where Dean is staying is dark and lonely and cold. The room is in a building on the outskirts of the village, where the reaching fingers of the forest hang over the snow. In these woods the wolf-man lives, the creature that Dean has come here to hunt.

On this day, Dean has not killed the creature, although he has been chasing it a good long while. When he returns to the house, it is with a heavy heart.

The innkeeper who keeps the house where Dean is staying shivers on the doorstep when Dean arrives. He is apologising for something that Dean does not understand; not until he enters the room and sees that he has been robbed. Something has entered and has stolen the food that Dean had laid out on the table that morning.

Dean does not care about the loss of his food. He has gold in his pocket and there is plenty to buy in town. But he is disturbed that any creature should have entered his room, which he has warded carefully against intruders. The act is an insult to his hunter’s skills. Dean floods hot and embarrassed at his failure and he pours his disappointment into rage against his host. He curls his hands into the landlord’s shirt and lifts the man against the wall as if he were nothing.

Quailing at Dean’s strength and the rage in his eyes, the innkeeper apologises once more. He tries to explain.

It was an angel, he says to Dean. A silver angel with wings at his back. I did not dare to stop him.

Dean does not believe in angels. He has good reason to believe in the devil. But he never saw anything that made him believe in God.

Still, the landlord seems an honest man and Dean finds that somewhere inside himself, tangled up with the thought of a small slender boy, he has room to hope for something better. And when the next night finds the wolf-man dead, and more food missing from the bedroom where Dean lives, he decides to try and catch a look at the creature himself. Of course, Dean does not know how to recognise an angel; so he asks a priest of his acquaintance to come and lend an eye.

The pastor arrives through the snow at Dean’s door, flecks of ice turning water in his hair, jewels making a halo beneath the gold of the lamp. Where’s this angel of yours, Dean, he says.

Dean has the pastor wait with him in the dark. They muffle their breath against the damp plaster wall and they wait as a shining child creaks open the door. Every fibre of his hair glows like the starlight. Dean is frozen, caught between the push and the pull of fear and desire. Then Pastor Jim slips from beside him and the child turns its beautiful face. Its mouth shapes a round, silent O of dismay.

Child, says the pastor. What are you? Where are you from?

I am a pilgrim, the child says, soft and frightened. Then: Please don’t hurt me, he says. He lifts his arms before him to show he is not unfriendly and the space where his hands should be shimmers empty in front of his face.

Dean looks at the silvery stumps. Sam, he says. And the child’s face folds in on itself in crumpled astonishment and Dean’s brother falls to his knees at his feet and weeps.

Dean gathers his brother up in his arms and holds him close to make sure that he is there. He presses his face into the softness of Sam’s shimmering hair. I have been searching for you a long time, he says.

Sam tells Dean that he has been walking quite alone for many years. He had been fortunate before to find fruit in the forest or from strangers’ generous hands. But the winters had been harder as Sam became older – and looking at his brother, Dean can see that he is not really a child, but a young man grown. Sam tells him that people had begun to shy away from him, to question what crime had brought about the loss of his hands. People began to say I was a thief, he says. And then, looking guilty into Dean’s eyes, I suppose I am.

Sam tells Dean that he came to this place after many days walking through the woods. I was so hungry, he says, that I thought I would die. So I fell on my knees and prayed.

He looks up at Dean. An angel came and showed me this house, he says. It told me that I might take of what was here, and that I might lie down and rest. I was too afraid to stay. But I stole your food. I am sorry, Sam says. It was wrong.

Dean tells him, I would give you everything I have, and more, if it would keep you at my side.

Dean does not want to take Sam back to their childhood home. So he takes him instead to a cabin he once lived in, up in the mountains near the sky.

They stay there together for many months. Dean does not hunt anything except birds and rabbits. Sam begins to teach Dean how he came by the faith that sustained him. And they both find joy, uncurling from the stiff silence of their years alone into the pliable, comfortable companionship of their youth.

By the time that the summer is shining hot above them, and Sam’s skin has shifted from snowy silver to sunshine gold, Dean feels happier than he has felt since Sam went away. There is only one shadow on the light of his joy. Sam does not like to have Dean touch him. He says Dean is too beautiful, and the scars of his arms too ugly.

Dean does not like to hear Sam talk this way so when Sam is sleeping he takes himself out to the forest and cuts a strong branch from an ash. He works with his knife smooth and sharp, scooping away at the wood. Soon two hands are forming from within the branch. They are slim and delicate like Sam’s hands used to be; like Sam.

Dean carries the hands back to their home. Sam is waiting and Dean clatters them out, one two, into an embrace on the woollen blankets of the bed. They lie there perfect and dead.

Sam holds out his arms and Dean straps the hands over the stumps of them. Sam looks at the hands. He sees the care and the labour in them and his chest fills up liquid and painful and warm. Dean is wavering in front of him, unsure, and Sam reaches out and brushes his brother’s cheek with the tip of one wooden finger. Dean closes his eyes and the hands run soft over his face. He can almost feel Sam’s blood beat beneath the lacquer. The hands ghost over Dean’s body and Sam is saying thank you, I love you, you made these for me, for me.

Sam’s fingers are sliding down over the freckled fretwork of Dean’s skin and the friction of them kindles a flame. Dean feels it spark alight, cold fuel of his long loneliness suddenly smouldering hot. His eyes are stinging with the smoke.

Sam clutches tight at the muscles of Dean’s back and leaves dull wooden fingerprints bruising behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

Many months go past in this way. The leaves fall from the sapling Dean maimed to make Sam whole. The forest turns bare, its branches black wrought iron twisting against the ice and snow. But inside the cabin the two of them are blistering, twined tightly together like the roots of the trees. Dean thinks, I will never leave this place. I will stay here forever and I will hold Sam close and I will kiss his wooden hands until they spring to life from the force of what we have between us.

But this is not to be.

One day, Sam is doubled over by a prophecy. The devil has wriggled into his dreams, black and warty and tormenting, snick snacking with a sharp blade another child away from his kin.

I must stop him, Sam says.

Dean says, No. Sam is not to leave the house. He looks at the curve of Sam’s stiff wooden hands and he thinks of the soft yielding flesh of his brother’s body and he knows what it is that he must do. He shuts Sam tight up in the cabin and he sets the pastor to watch over his brother.

Sam begs Dean on his knees to take him with him but Dean looks pointed at the maimed roots of Sam’s arms. Sam flushes pink and a sharp little mouse sinks its guilty teeth into Dean’s heart. He crushes it flat with a stamp of his heel and he packs his bag and he leaves. Sam chokes stifled and tearful behind him.

The pastor watches Dean go with a chill at his heart. He had been glad to see Dean’s shadow dissipate in Sam’s light. But the black rage driving Dean and his tight set teeth and his cold curt words, all these make the pastor anxious for the force of Dean’s passion. He counsels Sam to listen to his brother and to wait quiet for his safe return.

Dean does not know how he is going to hunt the devil but he walks with a quick certain step away from his love. He walks for many miles until at last he can walk no more. He lies down to sleep in a field beside the road.

It is while he is sleeping here, cradled against the prickles of a hedgerow, that the devil creeps into Dean’s dreams. Dean is thinking of his brother’s golden strength, the white gleam of Sam’s teeth and the soft dough dimple of his smile. In smokes the devil in the shiver of an eye and suddenly Sam’s shining skin is tarnished over with scales, his summer pond eyes clogged with dead yellow foam. Dean gasps awake and the devil wriggles out of him, dark smoke resolving into a raven on a branch. He speaks falsely in a rasping voice and says to Dean, Did you know that your brother has loved the devil all his life?

His words plant hard seeds of suspicion in Dean’s mind. But Dean dismisses them with a shake of his head, and paces on down the road to hunt the devil that is gliding beside him.

The pastor writes to Dean to tell him that Sam is silent and sorrowful without him. You need to come back to your brother, he writes.

The devil reads the letter that the pastor is sending and he buzzes with a selfish anger at the love between Sam and his brother. That child is mine, he says. So he sends the words on the page crawling from their places, fat and slow like dying summer flies. They rearrange themselves until the parson’s kindly message is all gnarled up into something dangerous and false. It does not mention Sam’s tears or the stumps that he wears naked or the new precious hands left lying useless at his side. Instead, when the devil is done with it, the parson’s crabbed old script tells Dean that Sam has taken a demon to his bed.

This is when the letter reaches its destination. Dean crackles it open and gasps in the words and a hot red rage slurs thick inside his veins. The paper crumples sharp and tight in his fingers and the handle of his knife digs deep into his grasping palm. The pictures that the devil sent him while he slept swell big in his mind.

Dean is boiling and suffocating. He thinks, I could kill Sam and it would be mercy. He sees his thumbs closing over the hollow of Sam’s throat, sees Sam’s pink mouth gasping for forgiveness and for breath. Then he thinks of his own hands on Sam’s body, all the ways they have touched one another in love.

So he writes, instead, a letter to the pastor; who had once been a fighting man.

My brother is corrupted, Dean writes. You must kill him. It will be a mercy. He must die.

Even while Dean is shaping the words, his fingers shy away from what they ought to do. Somewhere between the skin and the muscle and bone there are memories of Sam, knitted tight into Dean’s flesh. When he is done and he looks over the letter, the words stand stark and accusing against the page. Each loop of Dean’s pen becomes an eye, staring.

Dean thinks about Sam’s eyes, blue and brown and hazel and green. He tears the letter in pieces. Then he falls to his labour again.

This time, he writes, Sam. I love you. I do not know what has led you astray. But all I want is for you to come back to me. I cannot lose you. I cannot lose you again.

The devil in his bird-form is crouching in the tree above. He sees Dean’s first letter and puffs up fat with delight but when Dean tears it and writes the new letter, the devil decides to go to work.

He shivers himself apart into a thousand inky ants. They crawl down the tree trunk and over the grass, into Dean’s bag where the letter is lying in wait. They tug at the words and the meaning until it is twisted back to its first, false sense.

When Dean sends the letter back with a fleet-footed messenger, the devil falls flat on his back on the ground and laughs. Then he stands and sprouts his infernal wings and flies back swiftly to the cabin where the pastor is waiting, looking along the highway for Dean’s return.

The black bird devil sees the pastor’s disappointment when only the letter arrives. More delicious, he tastes the horror that crosses the pastor’s countenance when he opens the letter and reads what is written inside.

My brother is corrupted. You must kill him, says the letter. It will be a mercy. He must die.

A tight coil of fear wraps itself around the pastor’s spine. This must be some mistake. But he looks at the wire scribble of Dean’s angry words and he thinks about the set of Dean’s jaw as he left. He wonders about the years that Sam spent wandering on his own. He sees in his mind’s eye the dwindling of Sam’s flesh and asks himself if this weathering is the product of sorrow, or guilt.

There is a quiet noise behind the pastor and he turns round as fast as he can but he is too slow in moving his hands to hide the note. What are you reading? Sam asks. Is it from Dean?

No, says the pastor, but he is not used to telling a lie. The word comes out rough and unconvincing.

What has happened? Sam asks, in a trembling voice. He reaches the stump of his right arm towards the paper before remembering that he has no hand to grasp it. He has not worn the wooden hands since the day Dean left. He will not, until his brother is home to buckle them on.

Show me the letter, Sam says.

The pastor looks at Sam and thinks of him all alone and weeping. He sets his unworthy suspicions aside. And he shows Sam the letter and the death sentence written inside.

Sam turns quite white all over. He does not fold at the knees, or run. Instead, he looks at the pastor.

How will you do it? he says.

For a moment, the pastor thinks that this must be a confession.

You will need a very large knife, says Sam. And then, Dean can make a better head for me out of wood.

He begins to laugh. The laugh is very high and fast and it keeps on coming, like water filling up the pastor’s lungs.

The pastor hits Sam, hard, in the face, to make him stop.

I will not kill you, he tells Sam. I cannot do it. But I do not think it would be wise for you to stay.

Sam nods. His head droops heavy on his neck and he looks up at the pastor with a plea in his eyes. You could kill me, he says. I have endured worse pain.

The pastor shakes his head. It is against God’s will.

Sam thinks to leave the wooden hands that Dean made behind him. But when he steps off the porch back to his life of loneliness, he finds he cannot keep his feet on the floor without a weight on his shoulders. He asks the pastor to bind the hands at his back.

The pastor watches him walk off down the road, straight and tall with his misery on his shoulders. Where he will go to, the pastor does not know.


	4. Chapter 4

Sam remembers the day when his mother cut off his hands. All of his childhood had seemed to turn rotten, all the sweetness shown up for sickly poison lies. But now that Dean has wished him dead and the pastor has cast him away, he begins to see that that first pain was a sham in itself. Every cell of his body is fat with despair. Every step has him treading on thorns.

Sam wanders for many miles, not caring where he goes. He walks until his feet are bleeding and his eyes are blurring with sleep. The clattering of the wooden hands at his shoulders rattles the memories around in his head. Sam remembers Dean’s green eyes and his freckled skin, and the smile on his face when Sam touched him with wooden fingers. He remembers the bright splash of red blood on his mother’s apron, and the last longing glance at his home between the towering trees.

The ferns on the ground turn into hands grasping at his ankles. Sam trips, and he cannot catch himself.

He lies for a long time with his face in the dirt. He waits and he waits, but he does not die.

Sam thinks about the last time he lost everything. He thinks about the cold icy woods and the town by the lake. He pushes himself awkwardly up until he is kneeling, and calls out for the angel who once showed him where to find Dean.

The angel appears to Sam with a sound like singing. He dries the tears on Sam’s thin sad face and he raises him upright once again. He takes Sam to a quiet green clearing, where a grey stone house stands by a shimmering stream.

The angel tells Sam that this is a place of great holiness, where even the most sorrowful can hope to find a measure of peace.

Dean searches far and wide for the devil Sam saw in his vision. But he cannot find him anywhere and at last he feels his absence too long. He has had no more letters from the pastor, and somewhere deep in Dean’s stomach where he can best hide it the dark seed of worry that the devil planted is beginning to sprout. He cannot quite shed the image of his brother, scaly and sulphur-eyed in the arms of a cackling demon.

So he turns his footsteps back towards their mountain home.

When Dean sees the pastor waiting on the porch, he knows that something is very amiss.

Where is Sam? he asks.

The pastor looks over his shoulder into the distance and says, in a stiff voice, I buried him out back.

Dean feels his insides begin to turn over. While he has been hunting for evil, his only goodness has sickened and died. When he finally claws together enough air to speak, the words come out thick and slurred.

What killed him? he says.

The pastor turns then, so that their eyes are meeting. Dean does not understand what he sees.

As you wish, says the pastor. I will lie to you no longer. I could not kill him. But Sam is gone.

Dean cannot make the words join together in meaning.

The pastor says, How could you think him guilty when he is so good?

Dean says, It was your letter set me suspecting. But I never meant for him to leave me. I could not wish him dead.

A troubled expression settles on the pastor’s face. He crosses the room to the drawer where he has kept Dean’s letter, and crosses back to set it in Dean’s hand.

The loops and whorls of Dean’s first, angry message stare out at him from the yellowing page.

I did not send this letter, Dean says. He digs down deep into his own bag, and finds the paper from the pastor which brought him the story of Sam’s infernal love.

The pastor puts a trembling hand against his lips. This is the devil’s work, he says.

Dean says, Then he is a better marksman than I will ever be. And he turns on his heel and takes the road once more, looking for the brother he has lost.

Dean looks for Sam for seven years. He walks from the mountains to the grassy valleys, from the heat of the desert to the cool ocean shore. He looks in caves and he looks in cities and he looks in dead towns where nobody has lived for a very long time. He searches every face he sees and he asks every person, wishing for sight of a tall young man with two wooden hands strapped behind him. In all this time, he does not eat and drink. The angel who has guarded Sam helps to keep him alive.

Dean had thought himself a strong man and a hard one. But the loss of his brother has melted something at his heart. Often, he finds himself weeping. One day, this happens when he is sitting beside a stream. The tears fall into the stream and mingle with its waters. They flow down the river to the quiet place where Sam is living.

Sam has been working hard in this sanctuary, trying to be grateful for the peace he has found. He has laboured to cultivate plants for food, but it is difficult when he has only his stumps to help him, so that he finds himself eating mostly what the forest can give.

At the moment when Dean’s tears are flowing past his cottage, Sam is washing the stumps of his hands in the stream. He looks at the scars and the stumps as he cleans them, because Sam tries always to be truthful with himself in his heart. So when the stumps begin to shift as if roots are pushing out from inside them, Sam sees it straight away. He feels the movement trembling inside him, a power rippling through his arteries and veins. He watches as the water of the river flows over the stumps and slips solid into the shape of two silvery hands; and he watches as the flesh of his arms pushes out into the silver shadows until they are like gloves, shimmering over his own new skin.

Sam lifts his new hands out of the water and flexes the fingers in the light of the sun.

This happens three years after the brothers are parted; and it is four years more until they meet again. But one day, after this long time has passed, Dean comes to a quiet clearing in the woods. There amongst the birdsong and the small white flowers that grow beneath the trees, he sees a hermit’s shrine.

Dean looks at the shrine, which is humble and small. He looks at the worn stones that make it and listens to the rustling stream of the river that runs close by. He sees that the hermit who lives in the house has left a loaf of bread on a shelf outside the door. Strong letters cut into the wood say, Traveller, refresh yourself and rest.

The crust of the bread is nutty and brown, and it is sifted with a dust of flour. Dean can feel the snap of it cracking under his teeth. He thinks of the crust and of the bread’s soft insides and the stomach that he has not fed since he lost his brother. He remembers his vow.

I will not eat, says Dean to himself. But I may rest. And he lies down in the green grass beside the hermit’s shrine. The river whispers him to sleep with the sound of his own tears.

Inside the shrine, Sam is at prayer. He prays, as he does every day, for the strength to be happy.

Today, the angel appears to him in a shaft of light. His skin glows silver and pearls.

Sam crosses himself. I am blessed, he says.

The angel says to him, You are more blessed than you know. For the brother you love and have lost is close at hand.

Sam follows the angel outside, to the place where Dean is sleeping. He sees the dark eyelashes that shade his brother’s cheek and the freckles that dapple his skin like light on the forest floor. He sees the new lines under Dean’s eyes and on his brow.

All the good work that Sam has done to be happy without his brother seems to crumble away like dust. He cannot breathe unless he touches Dean’s skin. So he reaches out with one finger of a bright new hand and just brushes against his brother, feather-light.

Dean blinks awake.

Sam steps back, trembling. He can still remember the words in the letter that Dean had sent.

Sam? says Dean.

Sam nods, backing away. Please don’t hurt me, he says. He lifts his arms before him to show he is not unfriendly and the golden skin of his hands stands in front of his face.

Dean shakes his head. You cannot be my brother, he says. I carved my brother’s hands myself, out of the wood of an ash tree.

Sam steps into the house beside him and opens the trunk in which the hands are kept. He takes them in his own and feels again the care and the workmanship and the love in every elegant line. He carries them outside to show Dean.

When Dean sees the wooden hands, he knows that he has found his brother. He looks at Sam and tells him, I never wanted you dead. The devil –

Sam covers Dean’s mouth with his hand. Dean can feel the steady pulse of his blood beneath the skin.

We need not talk about the devil, Sam says.

The weight that has constricted Dean’s heart for all the years of his wandering falls away.

 


	5. Epilogue

One day, long after Sam and Dean have been reunited, the devil comes upon them in the house where they both now live. He has been searching for them a very long time, because the angel had thought it good to protect them from his sight. But the devil was determined and shrank down into a little old woman, and walked on foot across the land to find Sam, the child he had claimed.

So the devil comes upon the small stone house in its riverside clearing, and laughs in his gullet when he sees Sam standing out back. Sam has his fingers in the soil where he is planting, growing good green things that blossom like the life in his heart.

The devil does not take the time to notice Sam’s strange new fingers; instead, he turns himself into a great black hound and launches vicious, snarling, towards his prey. Dean, who is standing on the edge of the forest, starts forward in horror when he sees the devil jump. But he is too slow to reach his brother and the devil’s teeth are at Sam’s tender throat.

Sam does not fear the creatures of the forest. He reaches up with his bright new hands and tangles them in the matted fur that the devil has grown. Leave me be, he says.

When Sam’s hands touch the dank dark coat, the dog devil lifts his face to the air and screams.

What have you done to me? the devil tries to say. But his dog throat cannot shape the words and Sam hears only a strangled howl.

Then the fur on the devil’s skin begins to shrivel. His spine twists and his legs shrink and he snaps into the shape of a serpent. The serpent falls to the ground and writhes. The shining scales of its skin ripple and flake away, floating like soot.

Sam sees that this is no ordinary creature, but the devil come again to hunt him down. Unafraid, he reaches with his golden fingers and grasps the snake firmly as it wriggles on the earth. When the tips of them meet around the serpent’s coils, the devil bursts  _puff_  into a cloud of thick black dust.

Dean breathes deeply. Sam begins to laugh. This is not the high water laugh that made the parson anxious, but a low happy hum at the back of his throat. He flexes his fingers in the sun and Dean glows inside to see his brother shine bright. He does not wonder that the devil was not able to drag Sam down to his pit below the earth.

Sam and Dean plant the wooden hands at the spot where the devil was vanquished and a tall strong ash tree grows. Many years later, when the proper time comes, they are buried beneath it with their two hands entwined.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to read a version of the original that this story was based on, you can find it [here](http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm031.html). This is very different from anything else I have written so I would be really interested to hear what you guys think.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Boy Without Hands [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4156266) by [litrapod (litra)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/litra/pseuds/litrapod)




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